Fifth-graders study military as part of service-learning initiative

Fifth-graders at Braeside Elementary School in Highland Park got a balanced dose of reality as four veterans, who served from the Cold War through Iraq, spoke of their experiences and answered questions before Veteran's Day.

Visiting Lisa Colbert's fifth-grade class Nov. 8 were U.S. Marine veteran Carlos Aguirre, 28, of Northbrook, wounded in Iraq; Kevin Powers, 46, of Highland Park, an attorney for the DEA, who served in the Judge Advocate General's Corps during a stint in the Navy; Glenn Jarol, 66, of Vernon Hills, a Vietnam-era Air Force radar operator; and Gerald Oversen, 74, of Ingleside, a Navy veteran of the Cold War.

Prior to the school visit, Braeside's fifth-graders did intensive, interactive study on military service as part of a service-learning initiative. Each student interviewed a veteran by phone, or in person, and got to know them, Colbert explained. Some of the approximately 30 veterans students interviewed were relatives or relatives of friends.

Colbert said students received a fair balance of bad issues and good issues in service to one's country.

"While we discussed all of the brave acts these soldiers did to help our country, we also talked about how some of the soldiers were not always appreciated didn't have a smooth transition back into their lives here," Colbert said.

Aguirre, while stationed in the Iraqi province of Al Anbar, less than 50 miles from Baghdad, told Braeside students that his job was protecting schools, "to give kids like you a chance to learn."

"Our job was to look for the bad guys," Aguirre said, pausing. "There were a lot of bad guys."

Aguirre, who enlisted in the Marines after high school, said being a good soldier is certainly about physical preparedness.

"You have 30-mile hikes with all your equipment," he said. "But you have to be mentally strong. A lot of the challenges are mental."

Aguirre said many of his fellow Marines became best friends.

"The men next to you became like brothers," Aguirre said, adding that combat was "not about winners or losers."

"Being there was about keeping our friends alive," he said. "Technically, everybody lost because we all lost friends."

Feeling out the tolerance level of Colbert's students, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him, Aguirre chose words carefully, describing Mujahideen Freedom Fighters' "different tactics" against U.S. Forces.

"Sometimes they would dress up as women" to avoid detection as soldiers, Aguirre said. "And they would pay children to throw grenades at us. That was really sad."

Jarol, a chemical salesman after his stint in the Air Force, recalled for students the late 1960s when the draft lottery was instituted and young American men without student or hardship deferments could enlist, take their chances of being drafted or even flee the country, most often to Canada.

As recruiting pitches of the Cold War era promised, Jarol got "to see the world." He learned to scuba dive in Okinawa, Japan, made friends at many ports of call and met his future wife in a Newfoundland town so small that just two were in her school's graduating class.

"We didn't have email and Facebook then," he told the students. "We had stamps and sent letters."

Oversen, the senior among the assembled veterans, flew on military transports, including the workhorse C-47, for the Navy. He explained some post-World War II realities for American combat soldiers.

U.S. troops in Vietnam, Oversen said, "didn't know what Agent Orange was" and he went on to describe the terrible effects of the exfoliate on all forms of life, and on the landscape of a beautiful country.

"Dow Chemical developed Agent Orange," Oversen said. "And for what it was intended to do, it worked great. But later we learned some of us died from it. And what about the kids who lived there (in Vietnam). Twenty years and more after the war the damage from it was still there to see."